Writing is Demonic and All Literature is Horror
The written word has the power to delight and disturb and destabilize me. Literary horror “works” for me in a way that horror movies don’t, although I like horror movies. The strange, uncanny, and bizarre strike me with more force in written form. The unnatural feels more unnatural when it is conveyed in a novel or short story than in a movie, TV show, or photograph.
I think this is because writing is itself unnatural. Writing is always already weird. As a result, the most suitable literary genres—the place where form and content are best matched—are genres of the unnatural and unreal. Horror, fantasy, speculation, magical realism, surrealism. Even realism itself becomes a tinge unreal when it is conveyed in literary form, because of the inherent unreality, or half-reality, of the written word.
Writing is a new technology. It has only existed for around 5,000 years. Many—most—human societies have not used writing. Most human beings throughout history have not known how to read or write, and in many cases would have had no notion of such things as reading and writing to begin with.
The way you’re reading this essay and the way I wrote it—which is to say, with an alphabet—is even newer and even more contingent, because alphabets were invented after logographic and syllabic writing systems. This alphabetic system, in which visual symbols correspond not to units of meaning but to tiny units of sound, is one of the most brilliant technologies ever invented. But it is a technology, and it did have to be invented—not acquired, or discovered, or tamed. Writing systems are like iPhones and bifocals and sneakers—not like fire, eyes, dogs, caves, blood, rocks.
Language, as in spoken language, is natural and maybe inevitable. Language seems to be a distinctly human ability. Some would argue that it’s the thing that makes humans human. I don’t feel qualified to comment on the Chomskyan idea of a dedicated linguistic circuit in the brain, but language is certainly as close to a universal element of human existence as anything. Exceptions to the universality of language tend to prove the role. It is very difficult to produce a nonverbal adult human, barring a severe impairment of some kind. To create a person who cannot speak (or understand speech), you must subject a very young child to extreme—in fact, unnatural—cruelties, keeping them in near-complete isolation, locked up or wild, without any exposure to human society.
Language Thrives Against All Odds.
A linguistically deprived group of people will usually develop a new language within two generations: the first generation to lay the groundwork for the new language, the second to speak it natively. For a long time Nicaragua had no sign languages. Most deaf people in Nicaragua communicated with some mixture of lip reading and “home signs”—makeshift gestures developed with family members. In the 1980s, an unprecedented number of deaf children were brought together at the Melania Morales Special Education Center. The school did not teach them to sign. But, spontaneously, the children began to develop a fully-fledged sign language without supervision or guidance. The younger children drove this development, since it is in early childhood that we are most linguistically talented, able to adapt to and indeed invent complex grammatical systems with little effort. The sign language invented by the children at Melania Morales was not a clumsy substitute or improved repertoire of gestures. It was a full language, with a syntax and a large lexicon, and with its own conventions of tone and implicature and idiom. And while this is the best-known and most-studied example, it’s certainly not the only time a group of deaf children has developed a full sign language spontaneously. When a large group of people are brought together without the means to verbally (or gesturally) communicate, they will make a language.
Creoles, to use another example, are a creation so wonderful and strange that they make me feel hopeful about the future of humanity. When a group of adults come together without a shared language—because of trade, or migration, or enslavement—they combine bits and pieces of their respective languages. For the first generation, that might look like a makeshift pidgin, good enough for conducting business or handling necessities. But their children, like the younger students at Melania Morales, will fill that pidgin out into a new and full and stable and grammatically complex native language, a creole. It’s the most common thing in the world linguistically and yet the existence of each creole feels like a small miracle.
But Writing is Not Like That.
Writing does not thrive against all odds. Writing is a freakish delicate thing that has to be taught and learned and practiced. It is very easy to be a nonliterate person. As I said, most humans have been nonliterate, and even in the contemporary US, a hyperliterate society, studies show that we have a crisis of illiteracy: the skill becomes second nature only via extensive practice and training. At all times, in the back of our minds, we readers are a little bit aware of the wrongness of it—the constant uphill battle of symbolically representing spoken language in visual form. To be a reader is to be a little bit uneasy. We are contending with an unnatural presence.
(People talk about how their phones will one day shrink to a chip in the brain, making us all cyborgs. But if you are reading this, you are a cyborg already. Writing is a technology already implanted so seamlessly into your brain that you barely know it’s there.)
In discussing literature, people often speak of voice. Rarely do we really discuss how creepy the concept is. When you read—if you are a hearing person—you probably “hear” a voice speaking the words. The voice is disembodied. It is distant and it is inside you at the same time. The moment you try to pin down what it sounds like or who it belongs to, it changes, flits out of your perception. I remember, as a child learning to read, trying to listen to the voice in my head. Was it mine? My mother’s? I remember picturing a middle-aged woman with dark wavy hair; Sometimes I felt that it was her voice reading, although I didn’t know who she was. I hear these words as I’m writing them, faint but real. Am I hearing them in my own voice? I don’t know. My mouth isn’t moving. I’m quiet right now. When we read we hear disembodied voices and once we have learned how to read we can’t do anything to expel those voices, except for close our eyes and turn away from the text.
Writing is a call coming from inside the house, a monster or demon or spirit from outside that takes us over from within. Reading and writing are not instinctive. But once we master them, they turn around and master us, and take us over from the inside.
Try to look at these words without reading them. Try to see nothing but pure shape, the way you did as a child, before you learned to read. Try to turn off the voice. You can’t. There’s no exorcism for this possession.